"Resign" perhaps too strong?

NLUD the latest news is there is a dark horse emerging for VCship, someone outside the law school system is being considered , that person is very close the present VC and was his right hand man during his NALSAR days he left NALSAR in 2009 and is Prof in a prestigious institution( not any law school) he is highly respected amongst the NALSAR student community where he taught two very important law courses until he left, In JuLy (2019) he met the VC at NLUD and the grapevine is that later on they met the Chancellor -CJ and he was introduced by Prof RS , one thing about him is that he is much younger than PSJ and has lot of global connections

Unni? Won't work. He does not have 10 years as professor. He'd be great, but this stupid rule keeps coming in the way.

So what ? She is an alumna and that's it!

Are we talking about making her the VC?

Actually, I think there is merit in getting a really young VC out there. Quality of experience should matter more than length.

LMAO. Accuses people of not being "woke" and then says people should admire Lawrence Liang! Irony just died.

He was a dean at azim premji

Uhm - ok lets check off the number of things Sudhir has done that has made him proven shall we?

- he founded and manages CLPR , was a consultant on prime ministers planning commission urging UPA2, the national mission on manuscripts, the Kasturirangan committee on Bangalore governance , and the BS Patil committee on restructuring the BBMP- makes him uniquely poised to improve experiential educations and clinics system which is necessary if law students are to be taught anything about litigation and policy work.

- he has about 19 years of teaching on and off - about 10 of them as a professor - at Columbia , NLS, Oxford, and APU among other places, - would help him know which of his colleagues can actually do the work, and help persuade them to follow him to NLSIU.
- during this time- he also mentored/ taught most of the people on that ridiculous list - if not their teachers.

- has too many publications for me to count. - collaborates with young scholars and older scholars alike - good research inspires students/ faculty to follow suit as well.

- was the director of the school of policy and governance at APU where he ( along with others) started a masters course in public policy, and an LLM course. Along with contributing meaningfully to the Development course. - as much as NLS students want to believe that they/ their institution is unique- this does give one confidence to believe that Sudhir is up to the task.

Has Sudhir proven he can be NLS VC by being NLS VC? No . Obviously.

Is he far more proven than the young and inexperienced folks mentioned in the comment above? Yeah.

This stuff is all online.





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No one said anything about citations - I said he’s written too many things for me to count. You’d be surprised how quickly one can jump to conclusions when one wants. And it’s not my job to do your home work for you. His CV is in the public domain- as is google scholar - I do think it would be fair to say he’s not some ignored scholar - people do engage with him for better or worse.

The 'ten of them as a professor' would have been actually impressive had his original appointment as a professor was not being questioned to begin with. Further, most of what you stated doesn't make him a proven administrator, which is what the original point had been. A capable academic, sure. Menon wasn't an exceptional researcher or had hundreds of published articles to his credit. Still managed to do pretty impressive stuff, I'd say. Because these are different skill-sets.

Couldn't agree more.
People here just love compiling names.

Its usual the finance officer

Or hey - here’s a radical idea - instead of inviting people you think have the reputation of being “good professors” / “ good scholars”. (Because of their social and economic status )- why don’t you just call people whose work you’ve read and found interesting? You might surprise yourself and you wouldn’t be perpetuating myths of academic “superstars” who all look the same.

You’d think people would learn from the whole debacle with the print list of “next gen” “public intellectuals” .

Haven't read any Indian academic's work on Company Law and found it engaging on a regular basis. Barring possibly Umakanth. Rest are all practitioners. You are equating good researchers and authors with good teachers. Rarely do the skills coincide in one.

Ok so you mean simply as an administrator? Cause his academic work is on point.

His APU work does - for me - meet the standard of a proven administrator. Maybe your standards require that someone work within the NLU system only to be proven - mine don’t. I don’t think there’s that much special about NLUs administratively that it would require new standards. I don’t think working for private colleges makes things that much easier- you are still answerable to a lot of people.

Oh and I don’t really care how he got the processor job- was it unfair to others who didn’t get the same opportunities yes. Should it affect our view of his merit? Likely not.

He managed to do the job - fairly well from what I hear. That’s good enough.

Did you know that practitioners make very goods academicians or perhaps, better academicians.

I do. Just that they rarely want to.

Are you saying every person who has a reputation of being a good teacher owes it entirely to their socio-economic status and not research skills? That's quite a leap. If we actually are making it, then I'd say why even read up only work that's been cited in Google scholar? Surely that's also connected with socio-economic status of the writer? How many people would be privileged enough to have SCOPUS publications?

Nooo- I’m not . You’d be surprised how much one needs to be good at research to be good at teaching . Designing innovative new courses requires research skills. As does being able to successfully guide students in their writing and research. Classroom teaching skills alone don’t make for a good teacher - the classroom is a little less than half of where the academics job takes place.

On company law - it’s just not my field. Like at all. So I can’t comment. But I would be very suspicious if there was just the one good professor, especially since it’s such a lucrative field.

I'm not saying teaching doesn't require research skills. I'm saying latter alone doesn't make a good teacher. If you can write very good articles, but can't actually get your students interested in what you are saying or can't explain issues with clarity before them, then regardless of how good a research scholar you are, you aren't simply a good teacher. I've seen many well known people with excellent publications falter on that front inside classroom. If publications are to be the only indicator of research skills, then you ought to remember that in Indian universities, most faculty, especially junior and mid-level ones, get very little opportunity or resources for meaningful research, burdened with teaching and admin workload. So the metric you are using cannot simply apply to all. One has to rely on student feedback to a considerable extent to figure out who the good teachers are. What's the use of penning hundreds of articles on feminism if I cannot actually get at least a sizable number of my students interested in the principles of feminism that I'm explaining inside classroom? I meant that from the students' perspective, certainly there are standalone benefits of writing good papers and trying to reach a bigger audience through them.

Considering you haven't even got the names of many of these people straight, I doubt this initiative is actually as serious as you claim it to be.

All very good names, but I think the list is of talented people who are faculty, some of them are not with universities.

I think all the people mentioned would probably be open to guest lectures, regardless of whether they are teaching at NLUs. They would make excellent teachers too. Barring three, I've had the pleasure of attending at least one lecture of all the people mentioned in all the three lists mentioned so far.

only men come to mind?

Unfortunately, the only good female teachers I'd attended classes of across different NLUs were either from non-law disciplines (sociology, political science etc.) or professionals who'd visited as guest lecturers. I was trying to only suggest those law faculty whom I could vouch for personally. I agree with you about there being a need for more good female faculty members in NLUs.

pls add moiz tundawalla

One reads what one wants to. It's actually 29 who hastened to the comparison. The initiative of having a pan-Indian group of good teachers who can be called for guest lectures across NLUs is actually quite good. Would help these young academics to meet each other and brainstorm on matters of common interest too. I think there's also a plan in the offing of having a common online forum for NLU faculty for exchange of ideas, plans etc. Doubtless only the young ones would be active in it, but that's not a bad start.

1.Yes, the appointments in NLUs are NOW subject to UGC rules. In some NLUs like HNLU, RMLNLU, GNLU, Haryana NLU, NLU Assam, the state governments apply stricter control over faculty appointments. 2. Good faculty love to be located in big mega-metropolitan cities. Just ask how many good faculty would like to join at Ranchi or Aurangabad?

Working hard or hardly working?

Nah. Your calls to tribalism speak volumes of how the average NLU student thinks. But I definitely went to Nalsar. I went to the B.A. L.L.B hons - I have the battle scars to prove it. Being self critical is not the same thing as not wanting good things for your university.

And I definitely like NLU alumni professors I’ve worked with a bunch of them. I just don’t believe in judging someone’s work by the university they went to.

And there are very good reasons for students to sit in protest - and they do. I protested at Nalsar during that whole saga in 2010-2012. I even threw chalk at this incompetent fool [...] Prof and helped run him into his room. He was awful - he failed me also now that I think about it.

But I don’t like the idea of replacing that with a different kind of caste system based on access to the NLU brand. And I think the way we talk about academics in these universities is very flawed.

I’m saying that law school culture , and even student evaluations tend to push forward the most privileged among us, not necessarily the most meritorious.
I know sooo many women academics- who are absolutely brilliant, but who are not thought of as academic superstars- they’re brushed off because they only do “feminism” and “women’s studies”. I know quite a few Dalit academics whose work shows rigor and imagination - who students would brush off without even considering.

I saw this in law school. I saw the best professor in my school not get the respect she had earned - because she talked too much about feminism. I saw incompetent professors get a pass because “he’s a nice guy”. And I saw how students students made fun of other professors because they didn’t have perfect English diction. I also saw Savarna Male professors being hero worshipped even when they didn’t want it.

Definitely not all students - but yeah - many of them. This was the culture- and it seeped down to how one interacted with seniors and juniors. Even in Arushis batch - the men found such a cult following among juniors - because they were good quizzes or SBC president. That batch was filled to the brim with bright young women who were never described the same way.
In other batches one guy won a moot and instantly became an expert in all of technology law (are you kidding me?) but no one approached his teammate for help or advice even once - she was a woman.

This is a systemic problem - this exists among all groups in society and it definitely does in academia- it definitely does exist among law students - what they consider to be the ideal of meritorious is ofcourse shaped by the society they grow in. It is not wrong to admit that.

There is literally no better example than that list of public intellectuals the print put out - which has few women, fewer Dalits, and I don’t think anyone who did not work in English.

We would be building better law schools if we did not repeat the same patterns.

That google scholar thing was just a response to the person who wanted to know how many of Sudhir’s papers were cited or whatever - that’s not my measure. Mine is if they can produce research that is rigorous , imaginative, and important.

Students are demanding better faculty. Not necessarily NLU grad faculty. On an average, NLU grads tend to be more in tune with the needs and wants of NLU students. Hence they often turn out to be more suitable teachers at the NLUs. That doesn't mean good people from traditional law universities can't make good teachers either.

Regarding your point about the UGC notification on PhDs, there's no dispute. People having PhDs from India or abroad are exempted from NET. In all NLUs. The problem is bulk of NLU alumni looking to join academia have foreign LLMs and not PhD at entry level. They bear the brunt of the NET rule. You can't expect a person to start looking for jobs only at the age of 27-28, which is the earliest one can get PhDs mostly in law.
All other points I agree with.

Why not the top 5 Looney tunes cartoon characters while you are at it.

That would be Bugs, Daffy, Elmer, and maybe a toss up for the next two positions between Coyote, Foghorn, Porky and Yosemite Sam?

Sarasu has taken over w.e.f. October 1st. Here's to a new deal for NLS!

Stop trying to divide the students. You are obviously a puppet of the old guard trying to slander Sudhir.

Given the developments or rather lack thereof, it seems Breaking News was right about a deal having been struck after all.
Shame on the people involved, trying to exploit and take advantage of the same students whose fees go towards paying their salaries.

Sudhir is in an unenviable position. There are so many expectations from him, but it is highly unlikely that he has can deliver on many of them. Sure, he can hold recruitments - but how does he get good people to join? Students and NLS watchers are all expecting him to deliver big on this and hire alum and other big names. But this is beyond his control. Alum who are located abroad are highly unlikely to want to come back. Even those alum who are teaching in India are already part of other institutions, may have their own commitments and obligations, including family obligations in other parts of the country. That leaves him with a very limited pool. To attract people, he would have to make aggressive offers - fast tracking promotions, or offering chair professorships, or other such incentives. Here he will run into resistance from the old guard. And from UGC norms. Plus on top, NLS has severe money woes. Those who are thinking that big changes are coming to NLS would do well to temper their expectations.

He isn't an outsider who's been blindsided. He knew very well what he was getting into courtesy feedback from students and alum.

You should not hesitate to directly raise your concerns with the new VC. From what you have posted, the issues relate to routine administrative matters, such as the internet use policy and restrictions on movement. Can't the concerned SBA Committees (LTech and CDMC) directly raise the students' concerns and demand reasons behind the decisions? I don't think that he will simply shoo you away. He is more likely to state his reasons which can be discussed.

The fee-hike is a far more substantive issue. From what I have gathered, students can pay in installments and those who are unable to pay will have their cases considered by the Scholarship Committee. Sudhir has already written to some government departments and private parties. Given the large budgetary deficit, the only practical solution might be an increase in seats, possibly by 2021.

The point is, it should be easy enough for an alumnus who's now the VC to figure out what the students' concerns can be regarding certain policies. Therefore it's kind of expected that he'd discuss it with the students before making such policies instead of addressing the issues post facto. Otherwise what's the difference between him and other tyrannical VCs who are plaguing the multiple NLUs?

Now that's what I call a positive contribution. Far better than simply trying to brush every concern under the carpet under the guise of malarchy.

They didn't mean the websites were being blocked. You should spend more time reading something before rushing to comment on it. They meant that the university could track the specific student who would be using any particular website even if they were doing it through the university Wi-Fi. I still believe that's necessary for plain security reasons, but that doesn't mean the admin couldn't talk to the students and explain to them the necessity before taking a unilateral decision having privacy implications.

FYI the Delhi HC has given a decision recently saying individual downloaders who violate copyright should be warned. In this case, the students are wilfully downloading movies knowing fully well it is not legal. It is all the more objectionable that they are doing it using University WiFi, which is meant for educational purposes. Furthermore, it slows the bandwidth and lowers speeds for those who are using it for genuine educational use.

What is Sudhir's fault here? That he wishes to be ethical and respect the law of the land?

No, the fault if any is that as a VC, when you are implementing any policy that has a bearing on student privacy, you should talk to the students first and explain your reasons. Again, the VC isn't legally obliged to do that, but it's just plain sense.

If JNU ever starts an LLB programme, a lot of people would. Better faculty, better infra, miles ahead in every ranking and global perception compared to any NLU.

JNU gets central funding. Once NLSIU starts getting that, the students can demand to pay INR 10 only for hostel room, not before.

For central funding the HECI Bill must include NLUs, which Manan Mishra and BCI are opposing.

True enough. But till the funding is available, demanding lesser fees is unlikely to get the students of NLSIU anywhere.